Fever
by Zephyr5
Summary: He finds it mildly ironic that his death looks set to come, not at the hands of darkspawn, but between the whims of nature and the intrinsic fragility of the human body. - Rated for DubCon


**Rated for**: Dubious consent; not terribly explicit

**Spoilers for**: The Calling (novel); anyone who hasn't played past Ostagar in the game

**Other notes**: The origins character in this is female, but otherwise fairly vaguely described. I apologise in advance for any medical inaccuracies regarding fevers etc. If you haven't read The Calling then a lot of the references probably aren't going to make any sense.

**Duncan fans**: please don't kill me?

**Dedicated to**: all the awesome writers and artists on the SiB lj where I lurk (I hate lj's in general…the work on SiB is just so good that I'm willing to suffer for it). If any of you would like to post a link to this fic on my behalf, please feel free to do so.

* * *

Duncan has been a warden for many years, has gone from reckless youth to steadfast man in the relatively short time the taint allows for any Grey Warden to grow up. He has seen what Wardens become when they are consumed by the taint, has seen firsthand _why_ the Calling exists – and knows, now, _why_ it is the _Calling_. He has fought alongside a king, and seen, _held_, the proof that even a tainted Grey Warden can nurture and bring forth a life that is pure and innocent.

He finds it mildly ironic, therefore, that his death looks set to come, not at the hands of darkspawn, but between the whims of nature and the intrinsic fragility of the human body.

* * *

He's burning with fever, caught somewhere between dreams and memories, when he sees her, and somehow he can't quite work out whether she's real or a hallucination, but it doesn't matter, because he can't quite bring himself to care, not with the archdemon humming a twisted lullaby in the shadowed corners of his mind.

She comes from an earlier time, another life, when things were far simpler and he didn't really understand what it meant to be a Grey Warden – not yet…not yet… But he'd learned, soon enough.

Too soon, really.

A trial of fire, one he'd survived, more through fiendishly uncanny luck than anything else. He's burning again now, but there's no cool obsidian dagger against his chest, stolen from the first enchanter or otherwise, and he suspects his luck ran out when the nightmares began again.

"Vivian…"

The name is little more than a murmur, half sigh, half exhalation. She moves closer, and he is too fascinated with her tousled brown hair – just as he remembers it – to wonder why she isn't wearing a mage's robe. The archdemon continues to sing in the back of his mind, hypnotic, and the fever dreams reach up and pull him into their embrace once more.

* * *

The next time he wakes the fever seems weaker…or perhaps it senses victory and is teasing him with the illusion of recovery. Duncan can't quite bring himself to care, though he knows he should. He has a duty to…a duty…duty… The word is important, but he is simply too exhausted to concentrate, his thoughts skittering from one place to another like startled deepstalkers.

Past and present, present and past. He can't focus on either long enough to bring them into focus, to determine when he actually is. His mind is full of dream fragments, mixed with past regrets and future hopes, all jumbled together in the tangled web of the glittering cries of a corrupted god.

Duncan closes his eyes, hoping perhaps the answer lies in the darkness behind his eyelids, though he doesn't know the question. He is shaking, fine tremors that rack his body, but far from the cold that he has always felt more keenly than any native Ferelden he is suddenly hot. Far too hot. _Suffocatingly_ hot.

He's as weak as a newborn kitten, and the blankets covering him have been tucked around him by an expert hand, but nonetheless he fights – all his life he has fought, and it seems oddly _right_ that he should be fighting on the cusp of death, though he can't think why. The blankets fall away in stages, until he is left, clad in sweat-soaked linen trews and shirt. Victorious.

The shirt feels tight, ill-fitting, constricting. But victory over the blankets has cost him dear, and even as he fumbles weakly at the buttons of the shirt, breath coming in short gasps and heart beating far too fast, exhaustion drags his eyes closed and the music he loves and loathes at the same time lulls him back into the oblivion of slumber.

* * *

Vivian comes to him again.

He dreams, remembers, past and present so blurred that he cannot tell the difference between slumber and waking – he won the battle with the blankets, but now, in this, his victory has played into the fever's hands.

She is as he remembers, and yet not. But that's right, that's as it should be, because he's no longer the boy he was then, so why would she have been unchanged, untouched, by time?

She whispers his name like a prayer to the Maker, as if she can't be sure that he's real and not some Fade demon sent to tempt her. Her fingers tremble on his skin, pressing against his forehead with such gentle care that he thinks he might cry. In the wake of her touch the fever seems to cool, as if her touch is magic itself.

Before, in the past that is the present, and yet not, she had taken the lead. Now, in the present that is the past, it is he who reaches for her. It is he who pulls her to him, he who buries his hands in her hair and brings their lips together as if the world might end in the very next moment.

For a moment she pulls away, but Duncan is certain Remille is still droning away and boring everyone who might interrupt to death – he has little enough to thank the first enchanter for, but he supposes the man has his uses.

_Had his uses_.

The fleeting thought is there and then gone, lost in a discordant glissando and a swell of hungry, remembered lust. His hands are nimble as befits a thief, slipping beneath her loose linen shirt and sliding up her sides with a confidence gained some time in the years between then and now. She startles, arms coming up to aid him – stop him? – but his physical strength has returned, thanks to the taint, though it cannot defend his mind from the ravages of both fever and its own spreading corruption. The shirt slides over her head, hiding her expression, then tangling her arms, and as she fights to remove it completely – to escape? – she loses her balance and topples sideways, falling across him and rolling onto her back.

Duncan is swift to take advantage of her misfortune.

He starts at her navel, pressing heated kisses to her trembling skin. She whimpers as he moves upward, hands ghosting along the soft curves of her sides, the hard lines of her ribs. He can feel her tension, her anticipation, feels her startled jerk as he extracts himself from beneath the blankets and stretches out along her length, relishing the coolness of her body against the fevered heat of his own skin.

But they are both mostly still clothed, and if he is to burn up, he wishes to do so with her, wishes them both to die in an inferno of joined flesh, slick with sweat and desire. This time his fingers fumble only in haste, and his shirt is discarded to the side. Impossibly he feels hotter for its loss, the heat spurring him to divest them both of their trews so that he can press himself against her blessedly cool skin.

She lies beneath him, uncharacteristically passive, but her quiet, sobbing breaths are enough to spur him on as he worships her body with all the skill he's gained.

_Will gain_.

When her nipples are red and sore from the attention of lips, teeth, tongue, fingers, beard and breath, he finally retraces his path back down to her navel. He lingers there a moment, hearing the catch in her breath, his hands stroking over her hips and down the creases to her inner thighs. She tenses again, anticipating, and he cannot bring himself to tease by making her wait, making her beg, so he pushes her legs apart and presses his mouth to her, tongue flicking across her clit.

Her hips buck involuntarily, a shudder running down her legs and a noise somewhere between a moan and a wail escaping her lips. Duncan pins her in place, leaning his weight on his forearms where they cross the tops of her thighs and his hands grip her hips like a lifeline, like she's the only real thing in a world of flickering illusion and shifting memory.

When all her muscles tighten and relax, a hoarse, unwilling groan spilling from her lips, Duncan relents – but only because it is _his_ turn now. He takes his weight from her, kneeling upright, and the moment he does she moves, drawing her legs up so she can roll onto her front.

He's oblivious, his hands catching her by the hips once more, dragging her back, into his lap. Her protests, muffled by the blankets, go unheeded, and, caught in memory's deception, he barely registers how very tight she is, or the brief resistance as he sinks into her so deeply he can't imagine he will ever find a way out.

A good way to die, he thinks fleetingly, then thought falls away as instinct takes over, his rhythmic movement a percussive accompaniment to the gleaming melody thrumming through his veins, building, building, building to an explosive crescendo of blinding shards of light and oozing shadows that call him down to oblivion…

* * *

Duncan has been a warden for many years, he has survived hordes of darkspawn in the Deep Roads, he has survived the attack of a wrathful High Dragon, he has even survived the particular terrors of a mage giving birth – not to mention the trials and tribulations of travelling some thousand miles with said mage and her newborn.

It is, therefore, entirely unsurprising that his fever breaks, returning his focus – and what sanity still remains in the face of the growing Calling – and demonstrating the tenacity inherent in the human race.

* * *

The period of his illness is…vague, uncertain. He is haunted by fragments of events that seem both real and unreal, and he cannot find the words to ask the truth of the woman who has nursed him back to health. She has tousled brown hair, but her eyes are blue, not brown, and there is such a cold hardness to them that he doubts he could ever call them 'doe' eyes.

He watches her with such intensity following his recovery that she asks what's wrong, and though it's the perfect opening, he can't bring himself to breathe life into his fears by speaking them aloud.

She gives no indication that anything happened, nothing that might not equally be a consequence of the circumstances of her joining, and he has made a point of never delving too deeply into the pasts of new recruits. He will make no exception for her – and he knows it's an excuse even as he hides behind it.

* * *

They reach Ostagar at last, and it is little consolation when she survives the Joining. She is one of the condemned now, one of the Grey Wardens. Alistair is dubious, suspicious, but much of that is displaced fear over the coming battle. Already, having been like a father to more than one 'unwanted' recruit, Duncan can see the unspoken curiosity and fascination – the seeds of the only force even a Grey Warden is helpless against.

Love will blossom, Duncan thinks – hopes, perhaps. But cold blue eyes, and scattered, fragmented memories of sounds that could be pleasure or distress, haunt his thoughts, threading between the archdemon's cries to weave a jagged dirge. Duty should be everything to a Grey Warden, but the thought that he might have sown salt for another to reap sickens him.

* * *

The battle comes – and with it betrayal.

Though he regrets Cailan's death, regrets the weight of responsibility about to fall on the shoulders of the Order's two newest recruits, Duncan can't help but think this is the Maker's judgement.

He strikes down the Ogre, but he is wounded, and there are too many darkspawn. He drags himself to Cailan's corpse, mourning the death of the son of the king whom Duncan had been honoured to call friend. And as the hurlock alpha approaches, axe raised high, he surrenders to the inevitable, hearing the _Call_ surge in his mind, drowning out all sounds of battle, and he closes his eyes one last time.

There is an answer in the darkness behind his eyelids.

He wishes he didn't know the question.

* * *

**AN**: I don't know how long this took me to write last night (between playing cards and browsing music on youtube), but it was the early hours of the morning when I finished it. Originally it was going to use a character from another WiP I have, but it didn't quite turn out that way. I also toyed briefly with the idea of an epilogue in which (due to the Joining) the pc spontaneously aborted a foetus at her next moonblood…but it felt right to leave the fic where it ends; it's from Duncan's POV throughout, so it ends when he dies.

As I said up top, Duncan fans, please don't kill me! This fic was clearly spawned due to some tainted plot-nug that crawled out of the Deep Roads and bit me…going into hiding again now :P


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